March 2009: Monthly Archive

Tapbot was kind enough to give us a sneak-peak at Convertbot, their latest app, which converts units of power, pressure, speed, temperature, time, volume, work, angle, area, currency, length, and mass with the same kind of fun, fantastic interface they brought to their previous app, Weightbot (see our interview).

Rotate the wheel, old-school iPod style, to pick your category, tap to lock in the first unit, confirm, tap to lock in the second unit, confirm that, and you’re ready to go. (You can also tap the center button to change the direction of conversion at any time — i.e., miles to km, km to miles).

Rather then the generic keypad, Convertbot drops down it’s wheel to reveal a custom job, complete with backspace.

It’s a simple application done with a lot of care and consideration. It’s the kind of app we need more of. Full gallery after the break.

Convertbot is now available for $0.99 via the iTunes App Store.

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It’s summer 2009 and iPhone OS 3.0 has just been made available via iTunes. You have it up and running along with next gen Twitter clients, instant massagers, RSS readers, and all manner of Push Notification-enabled apps ready to alert you the very instant anything new is piping hot and ready.

Then it happens. 20 new Twitter DMs. 3 co-workers IM you. Every tech blog you follow updates about iTunes not crashing this time. You calendar reminds you about that meeting coming up. And your entire FPS combat team all invite you to come join their game. Suddenly Push Notification is trying to pop up 30 text boxes all at once — while you’re in the middle of an urgent phone call.

How will you handle this, Apple?

Right now a single SMS pops up a message box that you either have to deal with right away, and if you dismiss it, it’s gone. If you forget what it was for… well, that’s tough. Imagine 30 of those, all at once. Will you even be able to hang up your phone call before canceling out all of them? And if you do cancel out of them, what chance to you have to really see and process alerts #1-29?

Both the Google Android with its top-down slider and the Palm Pre with their bottom loaded notification area provide a far less obtrusive and simultaneously more persistent — and dare we say more elegant? — notification solution.

Could you, Apple, have an improved system ready to drop on us in a future 3.0 beta? At WWDC? Or is that waiting on 4.0? And if you do have a way of handling it, what is it? What can you do given the current architecture, gesture library, and frameworks of the iPhone to better handle the onslaught of notifications you’re about to drop on us?

Pull down the topmost menu bar a la Android? Create a dedicated Notification app on the Home Screen we can launch to see, like recent calls, what we may have missed?

Maybe our readers have some ideas that can help. They certainly proved smarter than us on the Bluetooth toggle question. What say you, readers, any ideas on how Apple can prevent the notification equivalent of “ping death” befalling us come iPhone 3.0 and Push Notification Service this summer?

At the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2008, Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G, gave us a shipping date on iPhone OS 2.0, and introduced MobileMe during Steve Jobs’ Keynote . It was held June 9, 2008, a date announced (according to Daring Fireball) on March 13.

As many other conferences announce their dates up to a year in advance, giving travelers ample time to make plans and arrange schedules, even those scant 3 months weren’t exactly a comfortable amount of notice. Now, with the end of March already upon us, and not an announcement in sight, people are beginning to wonder: when in the world is WWDC 2009?

Apple is juggling a lot of balls this year, no doubt about it. iPhone 3.0 needs a shipping date, iPhone gen 3 may need an intro, and then there’s Apple’s next Mac OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard to put in the spotlight as well. Oh, and the Sword of Damocles currently dangling over Apple: the intended return of Steve Jobs in June.

Scheduling for any of those things, as Apple is likely pinning their Keynote on all of them, could be making things really tight for the teams involved, given the two possible dates we’ve seen thrown around the internet, May 16-22 or June 6-12.

Many of us just want our iPhone news. Developers, on the other hand, have their livelihoods and their families to think about. Could Apple get thousands of them to drop everything and show up in just under two months? Is under three months even realistic? Would you spin on a dime and make travel plans the moment Apple releases the date? Or have you already got your time share in the Caribbean lined up, WWDC be damned?

Yesterday CrackBerry Kevin had a little funny at TiPb’s expense with their “Confessions” post of a Ruby Park strip. Fine. Two can play at that game. Above, via PvPonline, is the new official response to anyone bringing a BlackBerry into a “just works” place. B’okay?

When Apple released iPhone OS 2.0 over a year ago, very few people had access to the betas and screenshots were few and far between. Was it because early developers were seasoned, professional Mac veterans who took the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) seriously? Who knows. What we do know is that iPhone OS 3.0, following last Tuesday’s beta release, is running rampant over the internet. Somewhat less than honorable “developers” are even offering to “sell” access to the 3.0 beta. Yikes.

This has led to a lot of users getting, or at least thinking about getting, the 3.0 beta for their own iPhones.

Well, think carefully. And think twice!

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The App Store, even with 25,000 applications, is still a new market and one we’re all, developers, users, and media alike, trying to figure out. Developer James Thomson recently did an experiment to see how Twitkitteh, a fun little app, would compare in terms of sales and earnings, to his acclaimed PCalc in the App Store.

The results? Thomson talks about them in a blog post entitled Where Did it All Go Wrong?

Since Twitkitteh released about a week ago, we have sold exactly a hundred and one copies, at roughly 99c each. That makes it about £50 in terms of income at current exchange rates after Apple’s 30% cut. About 14 quid of that went on the domain name for a year, and about another 11 quid on hosting the domain on our existing server.

That leaves us £25 profit for three week’s work. Oh, and minus the 120 or so engineer-hours spent designing, writing, and promoting it that could have been spent on something else. So, depending on exactly how much you rate iPhone engineers at on an hourly basis, you can calculate exactly how much we lost on the whole project.

The good news is, with his grand Twitkitteh experiment completed (for now?), PCalc and PCalc Lite have received updates:

PCalc [iTunes link] gets a brand new engineering layout, with hyperbolic trig functions, hypotenuse, leg, gamma, delta percent and more. You also get a classic theme taken from PCalc on Mac OS X, and six new key click sounds you can choose from too.

PCalc Lite [iTunes link] gets just two of the click sounds, and some other small improvements. PCalc Lite remains completely free however, and completely awesome. If you want to get a feel for how the full PCalc works on the iPhone, just try it out.

Here’s hoping quality apps like PCalc and others will sell well enough that developers won’t have to spend their limited time working on the next great fart app to makes ends meet.

The Motorola MOTOPURE H15 Bluetooth headset is available and can be purchased in The iPhone Blog Store for $109.95. If you are looking for an absolutely smokin’ Bluetooth headset, checkout this review! Let’s see how it measures up after the break!

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There’s so much going on in iPhone gaming right now, it’s almost as hard to keep up with that as with iPhone 3.0. Two large industry shows bookend much of the current news, iGames Summit and Game Developers Conference (GDC). With multiple awards, great discussions on the future, and a slew of upcoming product announcements, we figured we’d take a moment and round things up…

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Last year, during the iPhone 2.0 SDK Event, Apple unleashed a slew of enterprise-aimed initiatives. Phil Schiller took the stage to showcase Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync licensing, as well as 802.1x, Cisco VPN, certificates, remote wipe, configuration tools, and more.

Schiller didn’t show up at the iPhone 3.0 Sneak Peek event (not until the apres-Q&A at least), and Apple didn’t announce something as spectacular as Exchange support this year. But was there anything compelling for businesses this time around?

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